750 words

Posted on January 27, 2013

Writing (Photo credit: jjpacres)

This week I felt the impulse to express myself multiple times. I felt like writing. Being a bit sentimental I opened up a notepad I got from my girlfriend as a birthday present and began a brain dump. A stream of consciousness. But my handwriting is painfully slow. This means I had time to do reformatting and rewording in my mind. Sot this was definitely not a brain dump. I wasn’t expressing my thoughts directly but rather doing some writing - I don’t know how to put this subtle(but important) difference better. And after 2 small(<A5 format) pages I gave up. I kinda wanna keep a journal but this is too much work for too little return.

Enter interwebs

Then I remembered this awesome site 750words.com. I’ve seen it before but I didn’t feel the need to use it. Now it somehow hopped back into my mind. It is meant just for just the thing I need - writing unprocessed brain dump. Apparently this is a thing amongst writers and they call it Morning Pages because it’s usually done in the morning. I’m only using it for two days so not much experience here but it just feels good. Yesterday I wrote in the evening and it was more reporting/diary style and today I wrote in the morning(two hours after I got up) and it was more reflecting style; expressing my thoughts. Why not just use Office(I like LibreOffice as I don’t have and Windows machines) you ask? I gives you space to type anything without putting it on the internet. There is something special about just opening a page and writing. Like picking up a notebook… It handles days for you. And it’s suposed to be private. And all your data is on all machines. Because it’s, you konw, on the Internet. This means I don’t need to spend time fussing over technical details and I can just write. And it also looks kinda beautiful. There’s a word counter too, the idea is to write at least 750 words, because this is enough you cannot just blurt it out but have to dig into yourself a bit. But it’s not to much. And the idea is also to do this every single day to get into the habit. So you get points and badges(a bit silly but nice) and also compete in challenges(to see if you can hold out an entire month).

Analytics

The super duper awesome part is analytics. It uses some fancy machine learning to analyze what you write. For a started you get a feedback on your typing(something I wanna improve). But then things get nice. I tells you how you feel and what are you concerned about. If you are writeing more extroverted or introverted, positive or negative, in wich time are you oriented, most used words and more. And the best of it: it is correct. At least for my two entries so far it got me figured out. It points out stuff you wouldn’t normally think about. And you also get archiving and over time analytics. And of course you can export your data. The only downside is I have to type in English which isn’t my primary language(or should I say mother tongue). But wit internet I grew accustomed that my typing is mostly English so it feels natural. It’s about as weird for me to type in Slovene as it is to hand-write English. That is not-really-weird-but-not-very-natural(Sorry for the hyphen abuse but I feel this should be one word). So I don’t mind, it’s totally worth it. Give 750words a shot. It only takes a few minutes a day.